10 October: Ignobel Prizes

The winners of this year's Ignobel prizes are announced around about now. The Ignobel prize is a spoof on the Nobel Prizes and are awarded for scientific studies that may seem, at first glance, rather silly - but on closer reflection, make you think. As I write this I don't know this year's winners, but here are 10 of my favourites from years gone by.

1. ANATOMY: Frans de Waal (Netherlands/USA) and Jennifer Pokorny (US) for discovering that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends. (2012)
2. CHEMISTRY: Javier Morales, Miguel Apatiga and Victor M Castano of Universidad Nacional Autonoma in Mexico, for creating diamonds from Tequila. (2009)
3. ARCHAEOLOGY: Astolfo Gomes de Mello Araujo and Jose Carlos Marcelino, for showing that armadillos can mix up the contents of an archaeological site. (2008)
4. ORNITHOLOGY: Ivan R. Schwab, of the University of California Davis, and the late Philip R.A. May of the University of California Los Angeles, for exploring and explaining why woodpeckers don't get headaches. (2006)
5. MEDICINE: Gregg A. Miller of Oak Grove, Missouri, for inventing Neuticles -- artificial replacement testicles for Dogs, which are available in three sizes, and three degrees of firmness. (2005)
6. ASTROPHYSICS Dr. Jack and Rexella Van Impe of Jack Van Impe Ministries, Rochester Hills, Michigan, for their discovery that Black Holes fulfil all the technical requirements to be the location of Hell. (2001)
7. COMPUTER SCIENCE Chris Niswander of Tucson, Arizona, for inventing PawSense, software that detects when a Cat is walking across your computer keyboard. (2000)
8. ENGINEERING: Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin of the Zoological Society of London, UK, and Diane Gendron of Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Baja California Sur, Mexico, for perfecting a method to collect Whale snot, using a remote-control Helicopter. (2010)
9. BIOLOGY: Fumiaki Taguchi, Song Guofu and Zhang Guanglei of Kitasato University Graduate School of Medical Sciences in Sagamihara, Japan, for demonstrating that kitchen refuse can be reduced more than 90% in mass by using Bacteria extracted from the faeces of giant Pandas. (2009)
10. JOINT PRIZE IN BIOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY: Marie Dacke [Sweden, Australia], Emily Baird [Sweden, Australia, Germany], Marcus Byrne [South Africa, UK], Clarke Scholtz [South Africa], and Eric J. Warrant [Sweden, Australia, Germany], for discovering that when dung beetles get lost, they can navigate their way home by looking at the Milky Way. (2013)